Dear Mr. Sinquefield,
As you well know, over the past few years, we’ve frequently found ourselves at odds. We’ve said some things. You’ve said some things. Were we trying to repair a soured relationship, this is where we’d say “sorry” for some of those things. But let’s face it, neither one of us is sorry.
We fundamentally disagree about what constitutes good public policy for the state of Missouri. You want to slash taxes, particularly for the wealthy. We look at the experience of Kansas, which followed your policies, and economic history in general, and think “trickle down” has been refuted as a serious idea.
You also believe that spending vast sums of money on political candidates — you wrote a record $1 million check for a brand new Republican candidate for lieutenant governor just this week — is simply an exercise in free speech. We believe it’s a dangerous erosion of the public trust that further separates most people (especially those who won’t benefit from your tax cuts) from the people who are supposed to serve them. We believe that money is property, not speech, but five justices of the Supreme Court disagree.
Here’s the rockiest part of our relationship: We actually agree on some things. Take school choice. We think you go too far with support of vouchers for private schools, but we likely agree that all public schools in the St. Louis region should open their doors to any student in the region, regardless of arbitrary boundaries drawn decades ago. You might even agree with us that the region should unite into one school district.
Regionalism is our area of greatest agreement: We believe that some of the solutions likely to come out of the Better Together study will help deal with fundamental divisions that have hurt our region’s unity for decades. We have broad agreement, we think, on the need for fewer municipalities, police and fire departments and municipal courts.
That’s why we’re writing you. Our region is facing massive challenges, and like it or not, we know you are going to be part of the conversation. So we have one, simple request:
Could you please instruct your vast army of political operatives to stop being deceitful about how they spend your money? Let us explain.
This fall, a political action committee from Washington, D.C., which you had previously supported, the Republican State Leadership Committee, spent about $300,000 trying to defeat incumbent Cole County Judge Patricia Joyce. A lot of people, including us, assumed you were the source of that money. You had funneled money to the RSLC before to surreptitiously support a secretary of state candidate. And Judge Joyce had ruled against one of your ubiquitous ballot issues. But your spokespeople wouldn’t fess up. Neither would the RSLC.
Last week, long after the election (Judge Joyce won, thank goodness), the RSLC filed paperwork with the IRS that showed that yes, you were the likely source of the $300,000, owing to the fact that on Oct. 9 you gave them that amount of money.
Look, if you want to spend $300,000 trying to get a judge kicked out of office, or $750,000 on a gubernatorial candidate, or $1 million on a lieutenant governor candidate (you do know the lieutenant governor in Missouri doesn’t really do anything, right?), that’s legal in the state. Missouri continues to be the only state in the nation that has no limits on either campaign donations or gifts to lobbyists.
A lot of people, including us, want to fix that. Just this week, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., announced plans to do what Gov. Jay Nixon previously said he would do, but hasn’t found the time for: Put an initiative on the ballot to reinstate limits on campaign spending.
“We have one billionaire in Missouri who is obviously trying to buy a government,” she told us. In case you wondered, she’s talking about you.
Even Republicans are rising up against your largesse. On Monday, for the second year in a row, conservative activist Fred Sauer of the Missouri Roundtable for Life announced he was filing a ballot initiative to limit campaign spending.
Here’s what we think: If either Ms. McCaskill, or Mr. Sauer, or whichever coalition emerges, is successful in getting a campaign finance and ethics measure on the ballot, it will pass. You’ll spend millions to fight it, of course, which is part of the point of this letter.
One of your paid spokesmen, Travis Brown, has said for years that you care about transparency. You used to write checks for $5,001, just to make sure they’d show up in the Missouri Ethics Commission 48-hour disclosures. How quaint. Remember when $5,000 was a big check?
But we digress. When you — or the people who work for you — secretly funnel money into Washington, D.C., political action committees to hide the source of the funds, it looks really sneaky and underhanded. It diminishes every one of your causes, even the ones we agree with. It also violates at least the spirit of a law already on Missouri’s books.
It makes it look like you’re proud of your efforts to buy statewide candidates but a little embarrassed to try to punish a judge who ruled (properly) against you.
In the coming couple of years, we will be working with Republicans and Democrats to try to make sure that the size of the checks you’re allowed to write to political candidates is a little less obscene. We believe Missourians are on our side. We’re sure you’ll fight hard. All we ask is, in the spirit of a good game of chess, how about you start playing by the same rules as everybody else?
Sincerely,
The Post-Dispatch Editorial Board
